The Salisbury Manuscript

by Philip Gooden

  ‘I thought the same thing,’ said Tom. ‘Not that the Canon had been murdered but that there was an intruder in the place. That’s why I armed myself with one of the Canon’s walking sticks.’

  ‘Be that as it may, Mr Ansell, be that as it may. I walk into the hallway of Venn House and I know – I know – by instinct that there is someone inside. And my instinct is correct for now I am able to hear movements from Canon Slater’s study.’

  Tom said nothing. Confirming his presence again merely seemed to point the finger of blame more firmly. Besides, he did not want to interrupt Foster’s narrative. The Inspector was obviously enjoying himself.

  ‘I walk up to the door and I see – what do I see?’

  ‘You see me.’

  ‘I see you, Mr Ansell. And I see moreover that you are wielding a club or a stick. I see by the light from the room and the passageway that there is blood on the back of your raised hands. I stand in the doorway and wait for you to explain yourself but you say nothing. What am I to think?’

  ‘I don’t know. No, I do know, Inspector. But it’s not what you think. I’m no murderer. You’ve just said there have been a spate of robberies in the close. Isn’t it possible that the murderer of Canon Slater was the robber?’

  ‘I’ve been a policeman for many years, Mr Ansell, and in my experience your thief and your murderer are like fish and fowl, quite different beasts.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, what reason would I have to kill Canon Slater! He was a client of my firm’s. I came to Venn House because I had been invited to supper by the Slaters. I had business there. I had a legal document to deliver to him.’

  Tom patted his inside pocket. The letter which was there, the letter formalizing the arrangements over the Salisbury manuscript, gave a reassuring rustle. It was a reminder of Tom’s real work, of his real life. But useless now, since the manuscript had disappeared and Slater was dead.

  ‘Just so, sir,’ said Inspector Foster. ‘I have established these facts since. Since, I say. Now I understand that the maid discovered the dead body of Canon Slater and went crying to her mistress and that, together with others in the house, they ran off in all directions looking for help. I know that there were friends and family of the Canon quite close by. But at the time, I was aware of none of this. There are still a few unexplained details. I haven’t yet spoken to Mrs Slater.’

  Yes, Tom thought, there were a few unexplained details. Like the fact that friends and family of the Canon were close by the scene of his murder. There were Walter Slater and Amelia, their presence easily explicable. But what were Selby and Cathcart and Percy, Slater’s brother, doing on the spot? If he were the Inspector, he’d be aiming his enquiries in that direction. He opened his mouth to suggest something of the sort, then thought better of it. Let the police do their own work.

  But there was still a small puzzle which he wanted to put to Foster.

  ‘You knew my name, though. You called me by it as we were leaving Venn House. Yet we’d never met before, Inspector.’

  ‘Someone said it, I think, as we were walking by. “Mr Ansell, he did it!” They said it in a whisper, in surprise.’

  ‘Who said those words?’ said Tom, more than curious. He remembered hearing the whispering behind him as he walked down the path but had been too distracted to distinguish any words. For some reason the remark – not the giving of his name but the ‘he did it!’ part – caused the hairs on the back of his neck to prickle.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘A man or a woman, was it?’

  ‘A man,’ said Inspector Foster. ‘But it might have been a woman, now I come to think of it. A voice coming out of the dark and the mist.’

  ‘It’s an odd thing to say.’

  Inspector Foster shrugged. ‘I do not see why. The person, whoever it was, was merely saying what others might have been thinking. From first impressions, you understand. You were in the study where Canon Slater was found dead, you were standing there wielding a stick, you had bloodied hands.’

  Tom shivered and looked down at the backs of his hands. He thought he detected a speck of blood on one, still. There was a sort of sense to what the Inspector said, though no one had seen him, Tom, in the Canon’s study apart from Foster. Or had they? Had someone glimpsed him through the uncurtained windows? If so that person might justifiably have assumed Tom was the killer. Unless that very person was the killer.

  ‘Anyway,’ continued the Inspector, ‘I was not paying close attention to people’s words, sir. My concern was to get you away from the vicinity of Venn House before anyone could come to harm.’

  ‘I suppose you thought I was going to take a swing at somebody with that walking stick.’

  ‘I was just as concerned that harm might come to you, Mr Ansell. It seemed best to get you to a place of safety.’

  ‘To the county gaol,’ said Tom, gazing round the room once more.

  ‘This is a secure place out of the public eye. Best to keep you in here while tempers got cooler and minds got clearer and I could ask a few questions.’

  ‘So I can go now?’

  ‘In a few hours you can go. There are a handful of queries I have to make and then you can return to your room at The Side of Beef.’

  ‘I do not think I’ll be staying in Salisbury, Inspector. My business here is terminated with the death of my client.’

  ‘But I must request you prolong your visit by two or three days.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because although my immediate enquiries concerning you, Mr Ansell, may be nearly finished, there is no saying whether you won’t be called to contribute to the investigation in future. If so, it would be handier to have you on the spot rather than sending to London.’

  Foster looked genial enough as he said these words but he tugged at his side-whiskers as if in emphasis. Tom sensed that he might be prevented if he tried to leave the city. And, in fairness, he might have some work to do in attending to Felix Slater’s estate.

  ‘Did you find any documents in the study, Inspector?’ he said. ‘Or, to be more exact, did you see a volume rather like a diary with a hasp and a lock?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Why, is it important?’

  ‘Not especially,’ said Tom.

  Foster looked as though he didn’t quite believe Tom but he said nothing. Instead he drained his coffee cup and stood up. He stretched out his hand and shook Tom’s, saying, ‘An hour or two, sir, and we shall have you out of here.’ The gesture and words were reassuring.

  But once Foster had left the prison apartment, Tom couldn’t be certain whether or not he had turned the key after him. If he had, it had been done in a discreet fashion. Tom was reluctant to try the door in case it was locked, which would indicate that the policeman still regarded him as a prisoner. Nevertheless, he did get up and test the door. It was locked. He sat down again and picked up his cup. The coffee was cold. He tried to steer his mind on a different course, away from himself, now that the first shock of Slater’s murder and his own incarceration had worn off.

  Tom started to wonder why Slater had been killed. Was it connected to the disappearance of the Salisbury manuscript? Or something different altogether? More important, who had done it? Who had felt sufficient coldness or fury towards Felix Slater to take a flint spearhead from the display case and plunge it into the nape of the man’s neck? The Canon had surely been taken off his guard. That suggested that whoever was in the study with him was someone he knew, someone he was not expecting to harm him. Therefore, not a stranger or an outsider, which tended to confirm what the Inspector believed: that this was not the individual who’d been breaking into other houses in the close. So, a friend or a fellow cleric, a member of the family, a servant?

  Tom ran his mind back over the group gathered in and around the entrance to Venn House. Leaving aside Bessie, the maid with the crooked collar, and Eaves the gardener, together with some other servants he didn’t know, there were Felix’s wife and his nephew and his brother, a
s well as Canon Eric Selby and the store-owner Henry Cathcart.

  He remembered what Inspector Foster had said, the words whispered into the air, the words which had enabled Foster to call Tom by name. ‘Mr Ansell, he did it!’

  Tom had shivered when Foster said that. Why? Some sixth sense? He was seized by the feeling that it was the murderer himself who’d spoken, in an attempt perhaps to imprint his guilt on the minds of those standing around. The murderer himself. Or the murderer herself since the Inspector hadn’t even been sure whether the voice was male or female.

  The only woman in question, Amelia Slater, she had quite a deep voice. And her behaviour on their only two previous encounters was definitely odd. That teasing meeting near The Side of Beef and then her plea to him outside the gate of Venn House next morning that he should say nothing of that first, chance event, her pretence the next day that they’d never met at all. She’d pretended well, better than he managed to pretend. Had Amelia Slater got something to hide? Was she afraid of her husband or was she merely tired of him? Was she conducting some kind of liaison with another man? But it was a leap from that to murder.

  Out of the various men who’d been on the scene, he had little knowledge of their relations with Canon Slater. True, Percy hadn’t cared for his clerical brother, had told Tom not to be taken in by his ‘holy act’. And he’d demanded that Tom get back the papers which had been passed over to Felix. And now the papers, their father’s memoirs, were gone. Did Percy travel to Salisbury to recover them in person? Had he confronted his brother and killed him following an argument?

  Too many questions and absolutely no answers.

  There was Walter, Felix’s nephew. The curate seemed on friendly enough terms with his uncle, the two had talked easily at the lunch table a couple of days before. There could be no motive there, surely?

  Tom was aware that Eric Selby did not like his fellow Canon. He recalled the look of distaste which crossed Selby’s face when he was asking directions to Venn House. Walter Slater had said that there was a coolness between the two men, although without enlarging on the reason. He found it hard to believe that old Selby could have plunged a flint into the bare neck of a fellow churchman. Yet, though it was hard to believe Selby was capable of such a deed, it was strangely easy to visualize him doing it.

  As to the next man on the scene, Henry Cathcart, Tom didn’t know what to think. His impression was of a kindly man who, at their only meeting, had been deeply affected by memories of Tom’s father. Yet this prosperous store-keeper and citizen of the town had once been a soldier. He must be familiar with killing at first hand. But what was his link, if any, to Felix Slater?

  And then Tom recalled that there had been another individual standing near the porch at Venn House as he was being so ignominiously escorted away by the police. A fifth man. It was Fawkes, the servant to Percy Slater. There was something unsettling about Fawkes. ‘You have a care, sir,’ he’d said to Tom at Downton station the previous day, as if issuing a warning. But he knew nothing further about the fellow. Fawkes was on the spot because he was with Percy Slater, his master from Northwood House.

  Tom spent an hour or more on speculations about who might have murdered Felix Slater, and why. He got nowhere. His mind wandered in other directions. He suddenly remembered the old woman who’d been travelling in his compartment on the Basingstoke train. She’d said something, wished him ‘Good luck’ perhaps. He searched for other portents to this ill-fated trip. He wondered when the moment of his release would arrive. If Foster required him to stay in Salisbury, would the policeman take the easiest course and keep him clapped up in Fisherton Gaol as a potential suspect? The next time Griffiths or the gaoler’s wife appeared, Tom would ask for pen and paper and write to David Mackenzie with a full account of what had happened. An intervention by Mackenzie might have some effect on the provincial police. Yet Foster hadn’t seemed the kind of person to be swayed like that.

  Tom’s thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the door opening. Mrs Griffiths stood there.

  ‘A visitor, Mr Ansell,’ she said.

  Tom resigned himself to another interview with Foster.

  ‘A lady, it is,’ added the gaoler’s wife, glancing to one side before moving away from the cell door.

  And he thought, for no good reason, that the visitor was that new widow, Mrs Felix Slater.

  But when the person who’d been standing next to Mrs Griffiths appeared in the doorway, he gasped. A younger woman stood there.

  It was Helen.

  Canon Selby’s House

  It was easily enough explained, once Tom had got over his first surprise at seeing Helen – his surprise and delight. For it was Canon Eric Selby who had, indirectly, caused Helen to come down from London on a morning train. He was aware that Tom worked for a London firm but hadn’t known that the firm was called Scott, Lye &Mackenzie. Many years ago, as Selby hinted to Tom on their cab ride from Salisbury station, he had considered the law as a career before deciding to go into the Church. He was a friend of Alfred Scott, Helen’s father, a good enough friend to have become godfather to Helen. Indeed, she had spent some of her childhood time in Salisbury.

  When Canon Selby discovered that Tom was an employee of his late friend’s firm, and apparently distressed at the young man’s predicament, he had telegraphed to his only contact, the formidable Mrs Scott, although without being aware of Helen Scott’s friendship with Tom.

  Tom didn’t know – nor did he spend time trying to find out in the first confusion of his meeting with Helen – exactly how events had unfolded when the telegram had arrived at the house in Athelstan Road, Highbury. Whether Helen had informed her mother that she intended to travel down to Salisbury by the first available train, whether she had left with Mrs Scott’s blessing, whether she had slipped out of the house undetected by her mother (a more romantic idea, surely), none of this mattered much. What was important was that Helen was here with him, in Fisherton Gaol.

  She sat, upright, slim, bright-eyed and fresh-faced, on the chair which had so recently been occupied by the solid form of Inspector Foster. Mrs Griffiths produced further supplies of coffee as well as some home-made cakes and generally fussed over their lady visitor. A red-letter day for her, it must be, with a lady and a gentleman from London brought together in the prime apartment of Fisherton Gaol.

  Once they’d got the preliminaries out of the way, the circumstances under which Helen had discovered what was happening to Tom and her speedy journey from Waterloo to Salisbury, Helen gazed appreciatively round the sparsely furnished room with its whitewashed walls. Her gaze suggested she was visiting a grand house, even a palace. As Tom had half foreseen, she seemed excited by his incarceration. Not, he hoped, the fact that he was languishing in prison under temporary suspicion of a murder but that he was here with her and she was here with him, and wasn’t this all a new experience, a dramatic experience for them both. She said as much.

  ‘Except that you can leave at any time,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, Tom, don’t,’ she said, reaching out to grasp his hand.

  ‘I don’t know why I’m here.’

  ‘They say that a man was murdered.’

  ‘There was a murder but I had nothing to do with it.’

  ‘Dear Tom, of course you didn’t. But you must tell me all about it. Tell me now.’

  So Tom described to Helen almost everything which had happened since his arrival nearly three days ago in Salisbury. He talked about his meetings with Felix Slater and the discussion of the Salisbury manuscript. He described his trip to see Percy Slater. He recounted the events of the previous evening at Venn House. How the place had seemed to be eerily empty. How he’d suspected that something was wrong because of the open front door, how he’d discovered Slater’s body, how a policeman called Foster had materialized at the entrance to the study and taken him for a murderer and how it was all an absurd mistake and Foster knew this and promised Tom he’d soon be released from this gaol, to which he’d
been taken for his own safety rather than because Foster genuinely suspected him of a crime.

  He left out a few details. He didn’t mention, for example, his conversation with Henry Cathcart and the man’s connection with his father. This didn’t seem relevant to the death of Canon Slater. Nor did he say much about Amelia Slater, beyond a reference or two. This was probably relevant but Tom was oddly reluctant to talk of the Canon’s wife, now a widow.

  He was gratified when Helen made appropriate responses. She sighed and looked aghast at frequent points in his story. She wiped away what looked like a tear. She rose from her hard prison chair a couple of times and came round the table to hug him as he sat on his hard prison chair. Tom began to see that there were advantages to being an innocent victim.

  Things were taking a turn for the better. And they took a better turn still when Inspector Foster came back to announce that Tom was now free to leave the prison. The Inspector looked admiringly at Helen, who swiftly explained why she was there. Tom asked the policeman whether he’d made any progress.

  ‘You asked before, Mr Ansell, about some papers belonging to Canon Slater. I have now established that they were kept in a chest in his study. The chest is empty. What did it contain, sir? Your attitude earlier today suggested to me that you knew something about it.’

  ‘There was a memoir written by George Slater, Felix’s father,’ said Tom, ‘and I think there were other items in the chest, loose papers maybe. I had only a brief glimpse of the memoir-book. It is of interest to the Slaters but I don’t believe it would mean much to anyone outside the family.’

  Tom didn’t add that the book was the principal reason why he’d come to Salisbury. But he couldn’t resist saying, ‘If things have been taken, doesn’t that show the murderer is the same thief who’s been working in other houses?’